We’re still over a year out from the wedding, and no plans are even in place. Yet sometimes I’ll be scrolling through a blog featuring some happy couple’s big day, and I’ll feel a twinge of sadness. And not because the photos make their wedding look impossibly cool and endearingly quirky (which, yeah, they invariably do). I just find myself mentally stepping across the screen and inside their shoes, pasting our faces atop their bodies, seeing myself in a dress with some flowers standing next to my man with our people all around and I think dear god no, I never want this to happen. I don’t want this day to come because then it will be capital-O Over. I wish sometimes that I could stop time right here, freeze this moment as it is, so that we will always be looking forward and never backward. And not because the wedding will be my one special beautiful day when all of my princess fairy dreams come true, but because I know this is our one special beautiful day when our friends and family will come together with us in the same place at the same time to celebrate something happy.
Fact: we are not going to get married again.
Even Moar Important Fact: our people are not going to gather like this again. I covet moments like these. I want to live inside a continuously looping 3-dimensional film reel of these moments. I want to wrap these moments up in satin and put them in my back pocket and uh… never, um, wash or uh, remove the pants ever again.
Ya’ll know I’m getting serious when I lapse into bad allegories.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. Life is meant to be lived, not monumentalized. Life is dirty and messy and imperfect and ever-changing, and therein lies the beauty. I know this, too. Our day will come and go and bleed into other days and we’ll grow and forget some things even as we remember other things. And so on until one day the beau and I will just be pixels assembled into the likenesses of our faces as they were at nearly 30 years old, staring out from a digital photo album at a great great grandchild who will never know us, let alone the moments of our wedding day. Nothing is permanent, nor is it meant to be.
That’s okay. Because even though they’ll be gone, at least I am here now, experiencing these things. Even if for just one moment, one day. And I think in the end, that one day—amongst the others—will be enough for me.
